Here’s a few things that I thought would be made of awesome.
 

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ACCESSORIES

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Leather Skull Clutch from missselfridge.com – $31

I have very few fun purses, but this one is awesome. Plus the entire site has a ton of cheap and offbeat gear, even despite the fact that it will be shipped from the UK.

My Little Pony Twilight Sparkle Hat from etsy.com – $31

I had to have ONE unicorn item, and this is absolutely it. This will have to compete with my Artemis hat for dominance when I’m shredding down the slopes.

Boba Fett Knit Cap at etsy.com – $54.99

Wait, what?? You’re not totally into unicorns, but still want every eye on you as you fly into the ski lodge? I may have to buy this one for myself as well.

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MISCELLANEOUS

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“Dawn in Autumn” iPhone Case – $35

Granted, this is just my personal favorite, but a really good idea for just about anybody is a new iPhone case. I haven’t even GOTTEN my iPhone 4S yet and I already have my case picked out.

Whiskey Stones from uncommongoods.com – $19.50

Granted, I totally stole this idea from Mindy Kaling’s blog. But as a past bartender and a single malt girl myself, it always burned my insides when someone ordered their scotch ‘on the rocks’. Gah!! No!

These awesome little inventions keep your liquor of choice cold without diluting it with water. Nifty, right?

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ARTWORK

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Painted Batman Art Print from Society6 – from $18 – $32

They have various sizes and different superheroes for the nerd who also wants to be ‘artsy.’

Map of Westeros from George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire from etsy.com – $20

This artist put together over 20 maps to make one giant compiled map of the regions referenced in one of my favorite book series.
 

Halloween!!!

Absolutely my number one favorite holiday. Not just because it’s two days after my birthday, but because it’s when all the cosplayers of the world can shake their collective heads and say “Amateurs.”

My Team Unicorn girls and I were asked to host a costume contest alongside Matt with Smodcast’s “Bagged and Boarded” at Golden Apple Comics(also known as “the place that gets all my money”). The resulting podcast will be up soon, but I was so psyched at all the costumes people came out with!! While the winner was (by audience choice) a fantastically accurate Edward Scissorhands, the close runner-up was a hardy male in a rocking Hit-Girl outfit. The fun surprise was when they turned out to be a couple! Shoulda known awesome would attract awesome. ;)

I went with a character I’d been a fan of for a while. Plus I already owned most of her outfit ;) From Neil Gaiman’s comic series “Sandman”, I went as Death, the sister of the main character Dream. All that was really needed was a punk rock wig and an ankh amulet. Slap on some white body makeup and some serious goth lips and I have an outfit that either delights or confuses people. Score!

Wanna see my fairly n00bish skills at Magic: the Gathering up close and personal? ;)

Team Unicorn was invited to play a “Game with Fame” with Magic 2012: Duels of the Planeswalkers event on XBL later today. Out of the four of us, Clare Grant is definitely the master Magic guru, but I at least count on getting pwned at least a few times. ;)

The official information for the event is here as well as a Facebook page for the event, but due to XBox’s limits on friend lists, here’s how this is going to go down.

I’m going to tweet out about the event again at around 3:30pm or so. IF YOU WANT TO PLAY ME (ensuring at least ten minutes of probable cursing such as “Fie on you, doublestrike!” or “Unblockable flying my #@^&….”), please direct message or @reply me your XBL gamertag on Twitter. I will be writing gamertags down and at 4pm, will start going down the list and inviting you to games.

Per the recommendation of the MtG guys, I’ll only be doing two-player games so as to play the max amount of people possible (Does that make me a Magic slut? DON’T JUDGE ME!). HOWEVER, I can party chat with as many as 7 people at one time (…heh), so let me know if you just want to say hi as I don’t want to exclude you non-Magic players.

I will NOT be responding to random party/game invites. Tweet me during that time frame and I promise I’ll respond one way or another.

Also, take a page from Wil Wheaton. Don’t be a dick. Should go without saying, but I reserve the right to immediately block or kick anyone who doesn’t abide by the Rule Of The Wil.

Hope to see you online!!! I’m super excited about the event and saying hi to as many of you as I can. If you don’t get to play with me, try the other girls. “ClareUnicorn”, “RileahUnicorn” and “MilynnUnicorn” were all created for this event and they’ll be on at the same time today

We were so excited to have been asked to present an award at the IndieCade Independent Video Game Awards this year! Let’s be honest, we’ll use any excuse possible to dress up. ;)

I gotta love any awards show that holds a giant RoShamBo contest in the middle of it ;) Between that and the Magic: The Gathering card sets they were passing out, I’d say we had a good time.

The games themselves were everything from what looked like a Kiss-O-Meter to a pretty sophisticated looking one called Sword and Sorcery, but extra awesome-name bonus points had to go towards ‘Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure.”

I get super caught up in the big name games (been spending FAR too much time going through the various multi-players on Gears3 lately), but it’s really good to see recognition happening for the smaller independent games that don’t have that large studio backing.  It’s funny; indie movies are getting so much more “cred”, but there’s still not as much recognition to the independent side of anything else yet.  Hopefully things like IndieCade are only the tip of the iceberg.

However, this time I was determined.  I’d never been to Seattle and I’d always wanted to go.  I still don’t own a laptop and was trying out a friend’s iPad to see if that would be an acceptable substitute for working while I was out of town.

Totally wasn’t. I need a real keyboard, dammit.

So instead, I wrote (HAND-WROTE, PEOPLE! THERE WAS A WRITING UTENSIL INVOLVED!) out these journal entries and have since transcribed them for posterity.  So you know, “Stinson” is a good friend of mine who used to live in Seattle and still goes up to visit quite often.

1/14/2011 (ok, I totally wrote 1/14/10, but present-tense me is SMARTER THAN THAT)

I landed around 3pm, jumped on the Light Link rail from SeaTac.  Walked from University Station to Green Tortoise hostel and stayed just long enough to drop stuff off, lock myself out of my room, banter with Tristan the front desk guy and lose my phone for about 10 minutes. Go me.

Walked away to Yelp-recommended Caffe Migliore.  Best damn soy white mocha EVER.  Also, The Sandlot was playing, so really, how can you lose? (The only two other people in the place were these middle-aged guys who kept commenting how they had never seen the movie. WHAT?!)

No people watching to be had however, so then walked to Bauhaus coffee shop (recc’d by Stinson, who I naturally trust in these matters)

After 1/2 hour of frustratedly trying to type on Clare’s iPad, I came to the conclusion that I will never buy an iPad.

Tried to hit Machiavelli next door, another Stinson recommendation, but apparently the rest of Seattle shares his high esteem of the place.  PACKED!! Seemed fun tho, will have to try again.

Ended up sating my ridiculously growling belly at McCormick & Schmicks on 1st Ave (I used to work at two different M&S’s around Los Angeles, so going there for dinner makes me feel equal parts comfortable and uneasy). Wonder if this is the “original” M&S, although I don’t believe so (Right region, wrong state. First M&S apparently is in Portland, OR. Sure my old managers would be happy to know how much of the ‘historical’ training I retained from working there).  Feeling cold coming on in full force so I nobly only had half of my delicious Manhattan (sadface), but devoured the portobello bruschetta and the ahi tartare.

Must find good sushi place nearby. Have feeling sake will be tolerated by ailing body much more than bourbon.

FYI, am reading ‘The Lost City of Z’, a tale of an early 20th century explorer looking for El Dorado (well, he was actually searching for evidence that South America was home to much more civilized societies than history has led us to believe, but ‘El Dorado’ is catchier), so rest assured that my speech is not usually this proper and archaic, but I am nothing if not easily influenced.

Stupid cold. It’s only 9pm and I feel like I’m going to collapse. Breakfast (free! :) ) is from 6-930am, and I must be on top of that!!

1/15/10 (Dammit! Yet again! Pay attention, past-tense me!)

Lesson learned from my first experience at a hostel: Not only should you say “Absolutely!” when the cute front desk guy offers to move you to an all-girl room, but you should definitely NOT take the bunk nearest to the door (Also known as: “What I should’ve remembered from Ender’s Game”).

Sadly, the comings and goings meant I was awake around 6:30am, no matter how much my eyes resisted.  It was the worsening cold that finally got me up, as all I wanted to do was blow my running fawcet faucet of a nose (misspelling of ‘faucet’ due to continued incessant reading of “Lost City of Z” which focuses on Percy Fawcett and not, in fact, on a failing of my formal education. In theory.)

Breakfast (free!) meant pineapple, orange wedges, banana, toast with PB&J and some scrambled egg whites. Holy crap, this is awesome.

Properly fortified, I headed out to Walgreens so I could scarf down far more than the recommended dosage of cold medicine, then to Zanadu comics to pick up yet another Neil Gaiman Sandman book and Fables: Witches which on my way to the Experience Music Project and the SciFi Museum (complete with BSG exhibit!)

Two especially good moments: Being recognized by Guild fans at the BSG exhibit (because really, where ELSE am I likely to be recognized?) and overhearing a little girl at the SciFi Museum:

“Mommy, what’s that?”

“A Storm Trooper, sweetie.”

Good Mom.

The line for the Harry Potter exhibit was crazy (Damn kids. How dare they.) and was sold out for the rest of the day anyway. Must try another time.

Additional discoveries: I suck at playing guitar. But may be able to handle drums. Thanks EMP Sound Lab!

Spent a good amount of time at Cherry Hill Coffee (I later found out this was NOT an independent coffee shop, but rather a small chain around Seattle. Regardless, my ideal of not stepping FOOT inside a Starbucks while in Seattle was upheld).  Soy white mocha was good, but not quite up to par with yesterday’s from Caffe Mig. Finally DID make it to Machiavelli Restaurant right at opening time, which was yummy indeed.  Tuna carpaccio was freakin delicious, although I mourn not having any wine with dinner. Stupid cold is such that my entire body sadly recoiled at the idea of alcohol.

Oh! Oh oh! Someone asked me for directions, and I TOTALLY GAVE THEM! Suck it, Seattlites, I got your city DOWN.

There is a mysterious door across from my cushy chair in Green Tortoise that people keep disappearing into.  I thought originally it was part of the kitchen, but nay.  Going through the scary gateway revealed “the lounge”, which I think is hostel-ese for “place to smoke while holding a guitar.”  Lungs immediately protested and I plunked back down into aforementioned cushy chair, all the wiser for my adventure.

Things to remember for tomorrow/future:

• Lucky/Happy on 1st. Clothing store that looked AWESOME. Passed it on the way back to G.T. and was too set on my homing beacon to stop and peruse (I did end up going back to the clothing store and was sorely disappointed. I don’t care if a white tank top was spun from Anansi’s buttsilk, I’m not paying $285 for it).
  
• Underground Tour – sounds interesting (TOTALLY. WAS.).
  
• Pike’s Market – The Tourist Thing To Do, apparently, and it’s only a block away, so I really have no excuse (Never did end up going. I’m not sad.)
• Linda’s Tavern – Recc by both Stinson and Logan. Thinking it sounds perfect for brunch tomorrow assuming the rest of the vagabonds let me sleep in.  Also hoping body won’t reject a Bloody Mary out of hand because that sounds REALLY. GOOD.

Wondering if I should be more social with the other hostel-ees. Hostilites? Hostel peeps?

Deciding against it for now. Comics beckon.

So basically, I loved Seattle and will absolutely go back. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to Emerald Con this year due to scheduling conflicts, but PAX is almost a certainty. Cheers!

I never, NEVER expected that in a mere month, we could do something like this. Milynn and I were on the way back from the beach on a gorgeous California day. We were amped up for Comic Con the next week and the fairly painful game of volleyball we had just played in Venice when Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” comes on the radio. We’re singing along and Milynn shouts over the wind and the catchy beats: “We should totally do a parody of this! About geeky girls!”

I think my reaction was somewhere along the lines of “Whuh?”

She caught me up in her fervor, we started coming up with lyrics in the car, and a month later we cut to THIS:

So crazy.

We originally were thinking we could get something together to release before Comic Con, an idea that was both adorably naive and completely ludicrous. As we fleshed out lyrics and brought on our friends Clare Grant and Rileah Vanderbilt, the idea just kept snowballing. Soon we had Seth Green attached for the rap portion and we started thinking of cameos and dance sequences. Rileah’s amazing friend Dave Yarovesky agreed to direct it for us (You can see his awesomesauce reel here), the ridiculously talented choreographer Ben Wolff (who, happily, admitted to being a little obsessed with Katy and her moves) said he’d do something fun for us. We also had to be super careful since it was a parody of an existing song, to tweak it enough that we weren’t going to get sued by Capitol Records. :)

It was really important to me and the rest of the girls that we kept this fun and goofy. We wanted to celebrate all the geeky things we were into, but not alienate the geeky girls that would be watching. We didn’t want it to be another vid of a chick licking a PSP, nor did we want it to completely copycat Katy’s video. PLUS, Milynn and Rileah had never sung before while Clare had recorded two prior albums, and Clare had never danced a day in her life while Milynn used to dance professionally! I assured them all I was mediocre at both and it would all smooth out ;)

We recorded the song in a single night and then left it to the professionals to add in the gamer sound effects while we focused on the dance portion and inventorying the many, MANY games/toys/dvds/comics/action figures we had between the four of us. Dave came up with the idea of having Seth being on dates as a story to kind of frame the video and song itself, turning it into a ‘Thriller’-like experience that I absolutely loved.  Sadly,  the footage ended up on the cutting room floor for the first release of the video, but we have plans to release the FULL cut with the extra bits in a few weeks.  I can’t wait, mostly because some girlfriends of mine Laura Catalina Ortiz and Mikaela Hoover are *hysterical* in it.  I admit, I balked a bit at the idea of the American Beauty shots with the various geeky things falling on us, no matter how pretty they looked. What saved it was that the entire idea of the video was going to be a parody, including those shots. Plus, if you’re going to be half-naked on top of comics, then by god we were going to do it RIGHT.

We called in favor after favor. Panavision Studios let us shoot on their lot, letting us have so much more space than we would’ve otherwise. Borrowing camera equipment. Everyone working for friend rates, we couldn’t have done it without everyone involved pitching in! Break.com was amazing, giving us with the budget we needed to be able to get some of the awesome-cool overhead shots you see in the video and get the visual effects post-production the entire video needed.

And the cameos. Oh my GOD, the cameos. It went something like this:

Clare: “Oh, hey, Seth said Katee Sackhoff was down to do a cameo in the vid if we want.”
BSG Fan-Me: “Holy @^$#^squeeOMG!!!1!!”

A week later…..:

Clare: “Awesome! Stan Lee is going to cameo as well!”
Me: [Brain shutdown]

We still had no scope of the amount of people that we had pulled together on this project until I pulled onto set early Sunday morning to see this:

…and pulled around to see a bonafide crew setting up! My first reaction was just: “Wow, all these people are here for US?!”

I then step on set to see Seth already shooting his rap portion of the video standing in between two Storm Troopers from the 501st Legion and my brain exploded once more. The rest of the day (all 14 hours of it) passed by in a geekgasm-inducing blur with more comics than a 10 year old could ever dream of, a Cheer Bear on Clare’s crotch and this conversation:

501st Legionnaire Lawrence: “Hey, so you’re cosplaying as Han Solo?”
Me: “Yeah, but I don’t have a gun to go along with it, sadly.”
501st LL: “Do you want a blaster? It’s one of the actual ones from the film.”
Me: “OMFG YES!!!”
501st LL: “We have a holster, too, I mean, it’s really a holster for Luke Skywalker, but…”
Me: “DON’T CARE!! AWESOME!”

So that blaster I’m holding in this picture:

is as close to the real deal as anyone’s going to get!!

There are just so, SO many people to thank on this one.
Dave Yarovesky, our amazingly awesome director, Chris Z and Shawn Patterson for the song mixing, Ben Wolff for the choreography and AMAZING patience with girls who hadn’t danced in quite some time ;) Mike Sutter, our on set photographer for making us look good, and Ryan over at Golden Apple Comics for letting us borrow those kick ass Iron Man and Terminator busts!!

And of course, Break.com for streaming the video for us!! It wouldn’t looked nearly as cool without their help.

——

“G33k & G4M3R Girls”

Game over

So anyone’s who’s seen photos from this past Comic Con may know my closest friends and I cosplayed as The Sailor Scouts (which was both awesome and probably the geekiest thing I’ve ever done)

Well, our own Sailor Mercury (cosplayed by Mari Provencher) is a very accomplished photographer. I was looking for some shots that weren’t quite so “headshot-y”. Here are some of the photos from the shoot, which I was VERY pleased with!!

See more of the shoot on my Flickr Photostream.

For me, this means that I think better when there is a constant stream of white noise that I can block out entirely. It’s the reason I could never study in the library at college; it was so damn quiet that any scrape of a chair, any turning of a page would distract me. My favorite place to go was our school’s Memorial Union building, it was where the post office, bookstore and travel office all came together. It also had the most awesome room looking out onto our quad with huge square cushions where one could set up books/laptops/various studying accoutrements. With the constant stream of students in and out and the bursts of noise from the requisite frisbee-players outside, it was the perfect place for me to concentrate fully on whatever was in front of me.

Hopefully not this. Slightly more distracting.

The same applies now. Minus the protesters, in theory.

I prefer to head out to a favorite local coffeeshop (of which there are many in LA, thankfully. I’m looking at you, Groundworks! I <3 you! ) in order to write or read as there is just enough hum of noise for me to be able to fully enjoy whatever is in front of me. At home, however, it gets a little more difficult as I don’t live in a hostel or commune. YET.

I love putting on background music while I’m writing, or turn on Direct TV’s music channels if I’m on the couch in the living room. But if I’m reading, I can’t listen to music with actual lyrics as my brain just wants to sing along. Instrumental music is a must. For a while I only had a few Firefly songs on repeat (I HIGHLY recommend “Inara’s Suite” if you haven’t heard it), but even the awesomeness of Greg Edmonson can only be listened to so many times. I therefore went on an iTunes binge and put together a still-growing playlist of music I enjoy to have on while gaming/reading/blogging/swiss polka dancing.

Maybe not the last one.

I tended to favor songs from sci-fi and fantasy (Quelle suprise, I’m sure. ) Some of the songs I’d had for a while (River’s Dance/Inara’s Suite/Inside the Tam House from Firefly. I also found out that a few songs I’d had on my iTunes forever like Adiemus was not done by Enya, but rather Karl Jenkins off the Pure Moods, Vol. 1 album. My version of Braveheart’s Theme? Also not by Enya or even James Horner, but rather by Crimson Ensemble on another Celtic compilation album.

I started adding to my collection by looking at various films and easily found songs from favorites like Lord of the Rings. However, I started realizing that while I loved them in the context of the film, they were sometimes a little too distracting and rousing to fit well in the playlist (Although, I did love The Council of Elrond (Theme for Aragorn and Arwen) [feat. "Aniron"] from the original soundtrack. Gorgeous!) They sounded like movie songs. Luckily for me, there were albums out there like Music Inspired By Middle Earth by David Arkenstone that fit perfectly. Movies like Avatar were awesome as well, but only a few songs (like Jake’s First Flight and The Bioluminescence of the Night were the type I was looking for.

The ‘Genius’ sidebar in iTunes was also extremely helpful, leading me to various songs from the Doctor Who and Angel soundtracks, to name a few. I also tend to have an affinity for asian themes, so Going to School from Memoirs of a Geisha is one of my favorites as well.

I couldn’t leave out anime and video games, so I started with classics like Princess Mononoke (The Instrumental Theme Song is just gorgeous), and Lelianna’s Song from Dragon Age: Origins as well as a few songs from Final Fantasy X are on there (“Wandering Flame” from Disc 4 is a favorite).

As a side note, it is a huge pain in the ass to get a text playlist file from iTunes. Getting a .pdf was fairly easy, but attempting to convert it to something that is easily cut-and-pasteable proved frustrating at best. So unfortunately, I had to make do with only including a .pdf file to easily view all of the songs.

The FULL Instrumental Playlist is available here in .PDF format for your viewing pleasure.